DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood is pleased to have local author Dylan Landis as she discusses and signs Normal People Don't Live Like This, on Tuesday, September 22nd, at 7 p.m. This event is free and all are welcome!

Normal People Don't Live Like This will be published Sept. 8 by Persea Books. It is a debut collection of ten linked stories—praised by Janet Fitch, Elizabeth Strout and Lisa Glatt— about the hidden lives of a teenager and her mother, and how they struggle to negotiate emotional damage and open themselves to love. The girl, Leah, yearns for belonging and worships the most delinquent girls at school, while her mother, Helen, secretly rents a welfare hotel room that she obsessively decorates. The stories – quirky and darkly humorous -- mostly center on Leah, but they're also about the disturbing, sometimes transformative lives of the girls and women she knows.

These stories have appeared in anthologies such as Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House; Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003; Women on the Edge: Writing from Los Angeles; and Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, among others, and in literary magazines such as Tin House, Bomb, and the Santa Monica Review.

Normal People Don't Live Like This (Paperback)

By Dylan Landis

$15.00

ISBN-13: 9780892553549
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Persea Books, 9/2009

Other Editions of this Title

At the center of this startling fiction debut is Leah Levinson, a teen at sea in the anonymous ordeals of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side in the 1970s. In ten installments, written from varying perspectives, we witness her uneasy relationships with faster, looser peers-girls she is drawn to but also alienated by. No one, though, alienates Leah more than her mother, Helen. Estranged yet intertwined, they struggle within the confines of their personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are. Just when they seem at a lonely impasse, each makes an impulsive change-Leah taking a risky trip abroad, Helen renting a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, the two of them independently glimpse the possibility of a more hopeful life. Dylan Landis is a gifted portraitist of unforgettable female characters. Normal People Don't Live Like This is a striking debut.

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